By Jann Swanson | CNBC
Consumer attitude appeared more volatile or perhaps indecisive according to their responses to October’s National Housing Survey. Fannie Mae said its Home Purchase Sentiment IndexTM (HPSI), based on selected responses to that survey decreased slightly to 83.2 in October from 83.8 in September.
The decline was due both to decreasing consumer optimism over household income improvement and concern over rising interest rates, a combination which kept housing sentiment relatively flat. The net share of respondents who say their household income is significantly higher than it was 12 months ago fell 4 percentage points to 11% and both the Good Time to Buy and Good Time to Sell components were down after picking up the previous month. The majority of respondents expect interest rates to rise over the next year although the share of those who expect rates to go down did rise 4 percentage points to 46 percent after several months of decreases.
